We'll have a few minutes at the end that are free for ANYONE to pitch an idea that they'd like to invite folks to work on with them. So don't be shy!

Many of the Challenges have a workshop that is related to the subject, taking place on the same day, so be sure to check out the details if you're interested in learning more.

Taking part in a Challenge simply means coming to that table in G04 at any stage of the day, joining the conversation to see what you can help come up with, and moving any ideas forward as much as possible. That can range from drawing a mock-up, to whipping up a basic web page, or even diving into some code.

You are welcome to form impromptu teams to focus on developing one idea as much as possible, or to roam from table to table to join the conversations and contribute your own insights and expertise to each Challenge.

At the end of the day we'll do a Show & Tell of what folks have worked on, and take an audience vote for some fun prizes.

SynBio4all is an open-science, hands-on synthetic biology learning platform. Citizen Scientists have the opportunity to learn about the exciting field of synthetic biology by initiating and contributing to synthetic biology research projects.

The Met Office has a long history of engaging and depending on citizens to support its science. For example, since the 1850’s the Met Office has coordinated the collection of marine observations from the both the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy to enable the highest quality forecasts in support of safety of life at sea.

This presentation will provide an overview of several citizen science initiatives in which the Met Office is involved, focusing on sharing lessons learned during the development and ongoing running of the award winning Weather Observations Website (WOW) which has received over 185 million global weather observations since its launch in 2011.

"Gather" is a new platform designed for creating citizen science campaigns via a dedicated mobile app. Any project can create their own dedicated app, and then choose how to collect and publish the data. Apps created gather structured data from participants, and enable a true community of interested people to contribute to research and collecting data together.

In the talk, we will create a couple of apps from start to finish, and cover the important unique aspects of Gather, such as social network integration, the "disguising" of citizen science micro-tasks as games, and distribution of your app to passionate crowds that will participate.

If you have a concept for a mobile app that enables citizens to participate in science, email ed@siine.com with a summary of your project and what you want to achieve, and we will try to create "an app that does that" for you to try during the Summit.

If you want to try out gather for creating your app, email a request to ed@siine.com with "gather" in the subject line, and we will forward a login and an android app to you.

Topics Covered:
1. Incentives, Gamification, and "marketing" of citizen science campaigns.
2. Use of the Gather Tool and methods to apply it to audience projects.
3. Questions and discussion

Habitat fragmentation by roads is a severe impact for many animal species, particularly for those with high mobility or seasonal migration behaviour, such as mammals or amphibians. As a consequence, roadkill is one of the main reasons for the decrease of populations of several animal groups. For most countries, roadkill data are only available for game species (huntable animals), however very little is known to what extent non-huntable wildlife or red list species are affected by roadkills. In Austria amongst others 24,852 European hares, 36,865 Roe deers, 1,414 European badgers were killed on roads in the year 2012. However, there are no data available on the effects of roads on non-huntable wildlife or red list species such as European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) or European green toad (Bufo viridis). In this project we investigate whether (I) the surrounding area influences number of species and individuals killed on roads and (II) wheather conditions affect the number of roadkills.
Roadkill is also important for people. Not only crashes with big animals such as stag, boar and Co. are causing damages to persons and property, also small animals like hedgehog and frogs can cause damage, because of accidents in consequence of evasive- or braking-manoeuvres.
Our clear aim is to reduce the number of roadkills as much as possible by investigating the reasons that cause roadkills. The first step is to get an overview on the number, range and distribution of roadkills. By gathering many single observations into one big data set using smartphones and online tools, it is possible to determine under which conditions (weather, time, etc.), on which locations (forest, meadow, municipality, etc.), on which street type which animal is killed.
In addition to answering scientific questions, we will (i) sensitize all participants for roadkill, (ii) identify roadkill hotspots and (iii) cooperate with agencies, NGOs and the local authorities in order to make roads safer for animals and people. Moreover we are thinking about the opportunity to warn drivers precisely of roadkills (including location, season and daytime) by integrating our data in vehicle navigation systems.

What should society do with autonomous airborne drones in order to actually meet the needs of a commercial organisation, or a social enterprise?

• Yes, they’re great fun to play with, if you can spare the cash to buy your own, or borrow one!
• And, the Armed Forces have already demonstrated a “use case” in the field of military conflict!
• But, what are they really good for?

In one of their regular “Technology Quarterly” updates, The Economist declared in general terms “it doesn’t matter how wonderful and efficient the technology becomes, if people simply cannot or will not use it, then it is useless.”

Join this round table discussion and contribute to the debate on what is reasonable, practical and ethical.

• We already have driverless trains on the Docklands Light Railway.
• We already have driverless cars licensed for use in California.
• When will we see Pilotless aircraft ferrying fare paying passengers?
• Another generation? Or two? Or three?

We’ll demonstrate how anybody with an AR Drone and a laptop can start to programme their own drone. We’ll also have the regular App available so that a few of you can have a go for yourself before the drone’s battery needs recharging!

Social-networks, smart phones, and internet mapping technology are
fueling a citizen-science Renaissance. These technologies are breaking
down barriers to entry, providing new tools to engage and educate
participants, and tackling data verification questions - challenges
that have long hampered traditional citizen-science efforts. With
species going extinct 1,000 times faster than normal, the potential
for this new breed of citizen-science to provide urgently needed
information on where plants and animals persist and where they are
disappearing is becoming increasingly apparent. Citizen-science may
well be the most effective way to scale the biodiversity monitoring
infrastructure critically needed to meet the challenges posed by
ongoing climate and land-use change. iNaturalist.org, a social-network
for sharing wildlife sightings, exemplifies many of the ways through
which internet technology is reshaping citizen-science. Through
international partnerships and collaborations, iNaturalist has rapidly
grown into a movement of thousands of naturalist from around the world
sharing tens of thousands of vetted, geo-referenced photographs of
wildlife sightings with the science and conservation communities. The
stories of iNaturalist and related initiatives reveal current state of
the rapidly changing citizen-sceince landscape.

Archaeology has long been successful in piquing the interest of full-time practitioners, organised volunteer societies and the wider public alike. In the UK especially (but also to some degree worldwide), it has benefited from an enduring tradition of volunteer fieldwork and special interest groups. Archaeology’s widespread appeal thus makes it an excellent fit for both offline and online forms of citizen science. Moreover, archaeologists seek to protect and understand a massive, geographically-scattered, constantly-threatened, rapidly-dwindling resource, with what have traditionally been fairly small amounts of public or private money. There are therefore compelling reasons to distribute responsibility for this effort beyond a rarified group of traditional specialists. This presentation begins by reviewing the strengths, weaknesses and history of existing participatory public activities within archaeology, as well as existing approaches to online crowd-sourcing of archaeological research. It is interesting, for instance, that early examples of the latter have focused on citizens inspecting imagery to detect archaeological features, pooling wartime tangible heritage, transcribing papyri, interrogating built architecture and/or recording of metal artefacts. In almost all cases, single kinds of contribution have been sought on behalf of pre-existing research agendas designed by traditional academics. While this is certainly beneficial and sometimes popular, it does not necessarily allow for the development of longer-lasting online communities or cross-cutting forms of citizen involvement. Nor, with a few notable exceptions, does it financially support existing volunteer archaeological communities or typically allow them any design input into active research agendas.

With these issues in mind, this presentation is also a first opportunity to introduce MicroPasts (micropasts.org), a UK-AHRC funded web platform that seeks to bring together full-time archaeologists, historians, heritage specialists, volunteer archaeological societies and other interested members of the public to collaborate on new kinds of research about human history. It is an effort to create a self-sustaining community space for multiple kinds of volunteer sensing and volunteer thinking. Hence, our first citizen science projects involve such activities as collaborative creation of 3d models of artefacts, public tagging of old photographs from early excavations in the ‘Holy Land’, as well as georeferencing and transcription of prehistoric metal finds from a major British Museum inventory. However, perhaps more ambitiously and speculatively, we also want to have a crack at proper co-design, in which there are serious opportunities for people traditionally distinguished as ‘academics’, fieldwork ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ to dream up new research initiatives collectively, and then to resource them via crowd-funding appeals. Hence, our first crowd-funding appeals are joint proposals from volunteer archaeological societies and one or more researchers affiliated with traditional academic institutions, spanning topics of shared interest and and including provisions for both on and off-line collaboration. There are clearly a range of interesting challenges in making citizen-fuelled archaeology of this kind successful, but regardless, we would argue strongly that these three domains (crowd-sourced citizen science, community project co-design and crowd-funding appeals) can be mutually supportive of one another in important ways.

Smartphone applications provide a valuable tool to both gather data/use skills/ interact with users and empower them in their daily life.
Despite promising results, their use for research is very rare, mainly because of the technical challenge their development represents.
We aim to build and share code and experience to develop apps for science with the aim to reduce the cost (time/money/effort) to develop such apps.

Analysing Citizen Science, Social Media and Environmental Volunteering information: what can we learn?

Help us brainstorm new ideas about how we can combine citizen science data with social media, geographic information, open data and linked data.
What kind of knowledge about the relationship between volunteers and their environment can we get by combining these data sources?

The growth in availability of data from social media, citizen science and other sources in recent year make it possible to understand new things about who is participating, what they are gaining from the participation and how it is possible to support volunteers better.

We are aware that other people in the area of citizen science are also looking at analysis of data from multiple sources, and the summit is an opportunity to share methods, work together and learn from each other.

The aim of the task is to identify and use a host of geospatial analytical methods to explore a range of questions. For example, we will look at Environmental Volunteering and wellbeing as well as the evidence for cultural ecosystem services from citizen science data.
Visit our session right after the pitches at 11 in room 217 to learn more about the challenge. Or stop by our table at the Hack Day during the afternoon for some inspiration about combining citizen science with other data sources; we’ll post the best ideas on our blog.
Bring along your own data on your laptop- we would like each person to bring their own data sets and let’s share methodologies and insights!

Science Makers is an new online community resource for hands-on Science Clubs that anybody around the world can initiate and contribute to. Join local events, national/international competitions, hack your own hardware and software for Science, collaborate on existing projects, add new projects, and share your science with the world.

Science Makers is a brand-new initiative—we are currently looking for ideas and collaborators. In this workshop, we'll present the Science Maker concept and invite you to brainstorm with us what a network of hands-on science projects could look like.

Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) could theoretically benefit greatly from the involvement of local stakeholders, but few papers address the capacity of forest people to undertake REDD activities. The I-REDD+ project has looked into Participatory Carbon stock Monitoring (PCM) including accuracy and precision; and PCM in existing REDD projects.

New project focussed on enabling a network of Citizen Scientists from the poorest households in Africa to generate evidence on everyday realities and choices. Outputs include statistics, video clips, new product and program designs and product testing maps. The Citizen Scientist network works in collaboration with multi-national producers and international NGOs. The business model is designed around a subscription system, which allows early access to the data at a price. After six months the data becomes open data. The design is longitudinal and data is gathered in two-yearly cycles about childbirth, transition to adulthood, love and sex, housing and livelihood, facing illness and death.

Large scale citizen science projects with broad impact may result in less collaboration with the non-experts conducting the field work, while smaller, local projects may foster increased collaboration at the expense of broader impact. Therefore, a need exists to foster new models of citizen science that promote more collaboratively developed, broad-scale projects, which have the potential to increase motivation, learning, and engagement from participants, but are scientifically rigorous and allow for broad research implications.

In this workshop, we will first present the development of an online citizen science collaborative space intended to support interaction between scientific professionals, environmental managers and the public to (1) train program citizen scientists in ecosystem ecology, (2) collaboratively define environmental issues of concern or scientific interest, (3) model and represent assumptions and existing information about these issues, (4) run scenarios to discuss potential research or management options, and ultimately (5) co-develop citizen science research and management plans.

To facilitate this collaborative process, we use a fuzzy-logic cognitive mapping software tool called Mental Modeler to create models that are then able to simulate changes to complex systems. The collaborative space can be used for communicating complex understandings of problems, generating hypotheses from both experts and the public, and developing adaptive management strategies.

This workshop will allow participants to view and test the online training content, modeling software used to create fuzzy logic cognitive models, and project collaboration tools.

This presentation focuses in the massive collaboration aspects of citizen science in Mesoamerican countries, specially spotlighting the analysis on collaboration between ethnically representative groups and grassroot technological organizations, where a great deal of knowledge transfer can take place and can be optimized.

In developing countries, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can be a valuable source of information, as often no detailed geodata or local knowledge is available. However, due to the complexity of tools and workflows of VGI applications, the participation within VGI projects is typically limited to technically skilled persons. We propose to focus on task-specific interfaces to integrate inexperienced user groups in the data collection process.
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Map (WYSIWYM) interfaces can lower the technological barriers compared to generic user interfaces and allow the contribution of precise geometric geographic data even for technologically uneducated persons. In this talk we report on first experiences with farmers in rural Laos. We are able to show that WYSIWYM interfaces foster the contribution of data of promising quality and at the same time significantly lower the barrier of usage. Thus, WYSIWYM is well suited to integrate contributors with limited technological knowledge into VGI processes and enables crowdsourcing geographic information at a local level. However, in order to make WYSIWYM approaches applicable in the field, we need to address implications of technological inexperience such as the relation between input precision and resulting data quality.

* This session is limited to 10 attendees *
The DIY movement has enabled people to develop custom electronic devices and extend the capabilities of current devices, namely, smartphones. This workshop will demonstrate a simple example of extending the abilities of a smartphone (iPhone) through a basic interface with a microcontroller (Arduino) for participants with no prior experience. In particular, participants will interface their own smartphones with an Arduino to create an external Arduino-controlled trigger for the camera on their iPhone, which can be achieved through the headphone jack. Participants will then add an input device to the Arduino, such as a simple switch or laser trip, which will in-turn trigger the camera. Required hardware and source code will be provided; participants will however have to supply their own laptop and smartphone which is restricted to iPhones for this workshop. Participants will gain a basic introduction to electronics and microcontroller programming, and will be shown how to alter the source code to build in fixed trigger delays, and to specify the number of images taken with a desired frequency. An example result is the creation of a ‘jump photograph’ trigger, whereby a participant stands on a simple switch (connected to the Arduino), and upon jumping into the air the switch is released and photograph is taken after the specified delay.